Eurovision Song Contest 2012 final, BBC One, review

Michael Deacon gives his verdict on Engelbert Humperdinck's romantic waltz and
the highlights of the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Azerbaijan.

A suggestion for UKIP. Put to one side, just for a moment, the demands for an in/out referendum on the European Union. The long-suffering British citizen has a more urgent priority. We need an in/out referendum on the Eurovision Song Contest.

Once again, poor old Royaume-Uni was crushed. This shouldn’t feel embarrassing. Britain produces nearly all the best and most commercially successful pop acts in Europe. We just don’t enter them for Eurovision. Adele, Coldplay and Take That aren’t going to represent us some giddy May evening in Riga, Bucharest or Helsinki. But that’s OK, isn’t it? We don’t care about winning Eurovision. It’s just a bit of silly fun. We only watch it to laugh at the funny foreigners. Oh those funny foreigners! They actually take this nonsense seriously! At least, we assume they do, because only we British get “irony”, right?

But then the big night rolls around and we get drunk on our sofas and no one votes for us and we finish 198 points behind the Faroe Islands and we start shouting WHO WON THE BLOODY WAR ANYWAY and we’re reduced to sulkily reminding ourselves that Britain produces nearly all the best and most commercially successful pop acts in Europe so we could easily win if we wanted to we just don’t ALL RIGHT.

This year’s contest, broadcast as ever on BBC One, was held in Azerbaijan – “the most easterly venue of the Eurovision Song Contest ever!” chirped Graham Norton. Norton is very good at Eurovision. Playful, dry, witty, yet affectionate – much like his long-serving predecessor, Terry Wogan. Both Wogan and Norton, of course, are Irish. You know what this means. Not only are we unable to find a decent British entrant, we’re unable to find a decent British commentator. (We once had an empire that stretched across the globe. Seriously: how did that happen? Did we win it in a raffle?)

Our man, Engelbert “The Hump” Humperdinck, was up first. This fact worried Norton. Singing first, he said, meant that by the time viewers came to vote they might have forgotten our song. Frankly, that sounded like our best hope. Actually The Hump’s song wasn’t too bad, but it was hard to see what genre its writers were aiming at. (“A camp version of Johnny Cash! This is exactly what the world’s been waiting for!”)

Maybe that didn’t matter. It was hard to see what genre most of the other acts were aiming at either. Russia had a gaggle of tone-deaf grannies. Albania had a squawking Bjork-alike who “found my plane on the lightless runway of your soul”. Ireland had Jedward, the disturbingly doll-like X Factor twins. They sang about falling in love with a girl. No viewer expects to escape the Eurovision Song Contest without some degree of psychological scarring but the idea of Jedward as sexual beings will be difficult for all but the hardiest to recover from. Soon you’ll see them sleeping rough, or stumbling into rehab clinics and soup kitchens: people who watched Jedward at Eurovision 2012 and were never able to readjust to normal life.

Iceland had a male-female duo. At last, you thought, something nice and conventional. Then you heard them sing. Probably the aim was harmony, but in practice it sounded as though they were simultaneously singing two very different songs that by some inexplicable coincidence had the same lyrics.

Then came outrage. Germany’s song, Norton informed us, had been co-written by Jamie Cullum. Yes, that Jamie Cullum. The jazz musician. The BRITISH jazz musician. Cullum – regarded until now as a blameless enough sort of chap – stood revealed as a traitor, a quisling, a collaborator, a musical Lord Haw-Haw. And in the year of Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee, too. The treasonous swine deserves to be stripped of his passport or at the very least his piano.

Eventually it was time for each country to reveal how its citizens had voted. The answer was: for everyone except Britain. We ended up with a grand total of 12 – 360 behind Sweden, the winners. Only Norway had the common courtesy to score fewer points than we did and save us from finishing last. Belgium, Latvia, Estonia and Ireland were the sole countries to give us anything.

We British pride ourselves on our tolerance and good grace, but if the Europeans think we’re going to forget about this humiliation they’re in for an unpleasant surprise the next time they come knocking on our door for bail-out money.

“Hello, Brussels! This is London calling! To Italy, we award… £8! To Spain… £10! But the maximum goes to Greece: £12!”